Bread Baking Made Easy

Rita Martin and Robin Hood Flour Mills - [1945-48?]

Rita Martin was invented in 1938 as a corporate character for Robin Hood flour, which by the time of this book’s publication was milled in Calgary, Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, and Humberstone, Ontario. With a name equally pronounceable in English and French, Martin was one of the faces of Robin Hood until around 1970 (Cooke, “Getting” 209). Nathalie Cooke argues that such characters were crucial bridges between the product and the consumer, lending comfort to change and glamour to continuity. In the preface to Bread Baking Made Easy, the reader is told that “Robin Hood Flour is thoroughly dependable—it is tested hourly in our modernly equipped laboratories by fully qualified chemists who make certain the high dependable quality is uniform always” (qtd. in Cooke, “Getting” 201). The book’s images, however, are largely domestic, including the cover illustration of Rita Martin baking bread over the course of a day at home. Martin “exemplifies the requisite qualities of taste and authority” (Cooke, “Getting” 210). Robin Hood had other characters as well, including Speck, Claire Wallace, Evangeline Martin, and Robin Hood himself.